The UN inspectors have found a dozen warheads usable for chemical weapons. In my opinion, the Iraqi excuse sounds fishy. If Bush bombed Iraq tomorrow morning, I'd feel a little bit less strong when I walked onto the I-5 freeway, but it wouldn't stop me nor a few hundred students. This evidence is bad news for anyone who wants to see peace in the Middle East. If Iraq is forgetful enough to leave a dozen empty, unusable chemical warheads in plain view, what else have they forgotten? Oh, we forgot to get rid of this thousand tons of Agent Orange that we bought surplus from the US in 1989. Doh! I think it's time for Iraqi military to get their arses in gear and double-check those weapons for stray strains of botulism. It reminds me of a song by the Canadian band, Three Dead Trollies whose humorous music is on mp3.com. Put away the dead hookers, used syringes, sex toys, and weapons of mass destruction, Iraq, momma's coming for a visit!
Today's rant has to be short because I didn't start it until 2:23 AM. For today's lesson, I'm going to comment a bit more on the importance of file format. You'll need to look at both very small pictures today to get the full meaning of the rant because they are different. But that is the point. The jpeg can easily compress an anime that was previously compressed with mpeg (I actually ripped the frame right off my Captain Tylor DVD #2). The picture is pretty big (460x488x24-bit) considering how small the file size is [18.1 kB], right? Well that's because I picked the right tool for the job, given to me by the amazing field of mathematics. A png at half that resolution (1/4 the data) is 25 kB. The png, though is doing its job very well also. At a whopping 736x804x4-bit, it weighs in at just 8.5 kB, a marvel of modern computer science. How did I do it? Well, I created the png in XFig and exported it to a png file with smoothing on. Then I opened it in Gimp and cut it down to a non-dithered 16 colors. The jpeg was interesting. I ripped it from my DVD using transcode. Then I opened it in Gimp and cropped it to size. Then I saved it as jpeg. The save dialog let me see both the preview and the size of the file. I sized to make it look good and here it is. I can't say how sweet Gimp is. Today I spent a few hours working on getting Script-Fu to work. Most of it was learning the obscure (yet simple) language. I was trying to get it to convert a bunch of PCX files into PNG files. I finally gave up and I decided to look for a program called ppmtopng. You see, I found a program that converts pcx files to ppm, aptly named pcxtopng and it came with my distro of Linux (Slackware). But curiously, there was no pcxtopng or ppmtopng converter. In fact, there was no png converters at all. What was the big idea? ZLib is the core of the free software movement, I could hardly see them being turned away from Slackware. So I looked on the web and sure enough there was a ppmtopng. I downloaded it and it needed a library called NetPBM. I found that and compiled it. But what's this? It has a program called pnmtopng! What is a pnm file? A pnm file is any of the ppm, pbm, pgm files. So that was my solution. I edited my mp3 to ogg converter script to convert pcms to pngs and viola! What did I convert? The whole System Shock 2 Multi Function Display (MFD). I had done it before using a trialware PoS program, but this time it was personal. ^_^. I really wanted to do it for free and I knew there was a way. I found it, it is Linux/NetPBM.
First, mega-props go to theJapanesePage.com for this picture. I looked up "learn basic Japanese kanji" on Lycos and it gave me that page. This is the first kanji I was set to learn at that site. I went through numbers, days of the week, people, verbs, and adjectives. Of course, I'll have to go through them five or six more times to get so I can write most of them down at the speed of thought. But with that site, I'm learning Japanese kanji. All of the kanji I learned are from the Level 4 Japanese language proficiency test, the lowest level. With a bunch of studying, I may be able to pass the level 4 test by this June. To pass the level 4 test, one must get 60% on the test divided into three sections: characters and vocabulary, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension and grammar. The reading comprehension and grammar is worth twice what the other two are. The test is 100 minutes long and the site suggests 150 hours of study (wow!). Of course, the test is only given each December. So perhaps, I could get past the much harder level 3 test by then. Why am I learning Japanese? So that I can visit Japan and talk to various people in Japan who may wish to speak less English. Why do I want to go to Japan? I want to see what their society is like and why they are the sei kai ichi at making anime. Not just because I like anime, but I think I would like a society that values anime more than live action movies and has a piece in their constitution denoucing violence and war. (Note: it was only after two atomic bombs hit two of their cities that they came to that conclusion, but one can't question the motives of truth.) They certainly have their priorities straight, though.
